1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a Computer-Telephony (CT) system. More specifically, the present invention relates to a system and operating method for electronically tracking and controlling telephone calls in a network environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
Organizations such as businesses and government agencies have historically limited telephone utilization to audio communications using traditional telephone equipment. Generally, a business distributes telephone equipment among the working place to support internal and external communications. Businesses also typically concentrate telephone equipment in a call distribution center to supply on-phone remote support of customers including product support and sales support. Telephone usage of businesses has greatly expanded over recent decades but remains similar in purpose to supply audio communications.
Recent decades have also shown great growth in organizational computing. Businesses have evolved from operations with little or no computing power to organizations with one or few mainframe computers to present-day organizations with networked computers or multiple computers on each employees desk. As computers have grown into present-day networks, still only minimal mixing of telephony and computing has taken place.
Thus, the large switches of telephone systems remain with substantially no connectivity with switches or equipment beyond the voice lines to the public networks. The telephone system has been considered a distinct entity, separated from computing networks without breach. The telephone system has been considered a standard utility rather than an extension of a network computing model.
In the past several years, some forward-looking companies have begun integrating telephony system components and computer networks as an extension of support systems and improved service.
Companies such as Intel.TM., CountryWide Mortgage and AT&T have implemented computer-telephony integration projects to meet business needs. These companies have implemented in-bound and out-bound systems in which telephone systems are integrated with computer systems. Using computer-telephony integration, the system identifies callers, determines the requests made by the callers, efficiently routes the calls, and extracts information from the callers so that calls are routed more rapidly to a most suitable destination with additional information supplied to answering personnel. With the additional information supplied to answering personnel, the personnel more easily reacts to the calls by tailoring the response to the caller and type of call. For out-bound calls originating from employees of the organization, an increasing number of organizations are utilizing systems that determine whether a real person has answered a telephone and connecting a telephone answering agent only when the person is available, thereby reducing telephone tag.
An integrated computer telephony system connects a plurality of telephone sets and a plurality of generalized processors, computers, workstations, terminals, network nodes and the like. A Computer Telephony (CT) system serves as a mixed telephony and computer communication system in which generalized processors on a network perform processing in conjunction with databases to supply a high degree of configuration of call processing and routing functions. A Computer Telephony (CT) system forms extended networking functionality by utilizes a private branch exchange (PBX) as a specialized network peripheral.
Computer-telephony applications bridge many markets and types of users, for example extending from marketing and sales to engineering and manufacturing. Using computer-telephony integration, users utilize desktop workstations to perform the same functions the telephone as well as extend the operations with data integration ranging from an electronic rolodex, E-mail, and text-to-speech, to call center management, remote communication, and teleconferencing.
In a computer-telephony ion system, traditional telephone sets are considered audio-only terminals in a network. Television sets are audio-visual terminals with realtime viewing capabilities. Computers with high bandwidth network capabilities are considered full audio-visual-data terminals with independent processing functionality. The traditional notion of telephony as the science and technology of the telephone is inaccurate and limited. Modern telephony should be considered as a provider of realtime audio-visual-data connection of two or more people or parties.
In present-day telephone systems, callers into an organization typically call a central telephone number which is usually not mnemonic and therefore difficult to ascertain without consulting a directory or other listing. A caller then typically requests to be routed to a particular person or organizational unit. When the particular person or a group of people are not available, the user has no recourse than to wait for an answer, wait until a timeout occurs, or leave a message on a voice messaging system.
What is needed is a system and operating method for facilitating communications and messaging in an organizational business unit.